Blind Signing and Transaction Manifests

Overview

Blind signing is the practice of signing transactions whose effects you cannot verify. On Ethereum, users routinely approve transactions that are opaque hexadecimal data — they cannot see what the transaction will actually do until after it executes.

The Cost

Blind signing has enabled over $100 million in losses through approval exploits, phishing, and malicious contract interactions. Users unknowingly grant unlimited token approvals that are later drained.

How Radix Solves This

Radix transaction manifests are deterministic, human-readable descriptions of exactly what a transaction will do. The Radix Wallet parses these manifests and shows users exactly which assets will move, where they'll go, and what they'll receive — before signing.

This is equally important for AI agents — autonomous agents can read and verify manifests programmatically, never blind-signing a transaction they don't understand.

Human-Readable by Design

A manifest describes a transaction as a sequence of concrete asset movements — "withdraw 10 tokens from my account, then deposit those tokens into Bob's account" — rather than an opaque call to a contract. Because the intent is explicit, the Radix Wallet "can show a clear, meaningful summary of exactly what's going to happen" before the user approves it (Radix Learn: What are Transaction Manifests). The manifest instruction set is deterministic, so the summary the wallet renders is exactly what the network will execute.

Built-in Guarantees

Manifests go further than transparency: they let the user assert guarantees on the outcome. In a token swap, the manifest can require a minimum return — if a swap would return less than the amount the user specified, "call the whole thing off" and revert the entire transaction (Radix Learn). This protects users against slippage, front-running, and buggy or malicious components regardless of what the underlying code does — a protection EVM's blind approval model cannot offer. Autonomous AI agents gain the same guarantees for free, since they read and construct the very same manifests.